hat he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of
nature which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in
the front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean
lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out),
happening to call at these lodgings, with the probable intention of
raising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the real
life of mercantile endeavor; the economic struggle between him and the
landlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, the
wealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the economic struggle, and
goes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him out (happening at
that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is
now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind; he is
in an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the State
and ruled by public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime
future.

Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still dreams
at night of this old idea of having an ordinary home. He asked for so
little, and he has been offered so much. He has been offered bribes
of worlds and systems; he has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New
Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house; and that has been refused him.

Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts of English
history. The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house
on to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of
progress. They did literally force them into factories and the modern
wage-slavery, assuring them all the time that this was the only way to
wealth and civilization. Just as they had dragged the rustic from the
convent food and ale by saying that the streets of heaven were paved
with gold, so now they dragged him from the village food and ale by
telling him that the streets of London were paved with gold. As he
entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered the gloomy porch
of Industrialism, being told that each of them was the gate of the
future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison to prison, nay, into
darkening prisons, for Calvinism opened one small window upon heaven.
And now he is asked, in the same educated and authoritative tones, to
enter another dark porch, at which he has to surrender, into unseen
hands, his children, his small possessions and all the habits of his
fathers.

Whether this last openin